Pierre Louys’ novel The Woman and the Puppet, first published in 1898, has been a popular source for cinema, with at least seven adaptations starting as early as 1920 (an American silent by the same name) through 1982 (a German version called Aphrodite). Josef von Sternberg put his gossamer-and-smoke stamp on it in 1936 under the studio-enforced title of The Devil Is a Woman, with Dietrich as the heartless tease Concha Perez and first Lionel Atwill, then Cesar Romero, as her much-abused boytoys. The property suited Sternberg’s sadomasochistic worldview perfectly, but it would take Luis Buñuel, four decades later, to show what Sternberg could only suggest.